Chapter 7 - The Scars Beneath the Lace
The silence that followed was suffocating. Several high-society women in the back gasped, covering their mouths with gloved hands. Powerful corporate board members looked at each other in sheer disgust.
Julian felt the room tilt on its axis. A cold, suffocating rage, worse than the madness that had made him strike Eleanor, settled deep into his bones.
"She... what?" Julian whispered, his voice trembling with a horror so profound it made his knees shake.
"She's lying!" Eleanor shrieked from the pool, her voice high-pitched, slipping into sheer desperation as she tried to hoist her heavy body onto the coping. "The child is a pathological liar! She's three! She doesn't know what she's saying! Julian, look at me! I raised you!"
Lucas didn’t wait. He stepped up beside Julian, his jaw set in iron. "Hold her steady, Jules."
Julian held Lily tight. Lucas reached out with gentle, careful hands and pulled back the soaked lace sleeves of Lily’s dress, sliding them down over her delicate, pale arms.
A collective groan of absolute horror rippled through the two hundred guests.
Lily’s upper arms, hidden for weeks under the long-sleeved, high-end designer dresses Eleanor insisted on dressing her in, were covered in deep, purple and yellow pinch marks. Tiny, circular bruises dotted her inner biceps—the unmistakable signs of someone twisting flesh viciously to inflict maximum pain without leaving marks visible to casual observers.
And on the soft skin of her left shoulder blade, exposed as the dress tore slightly, was the distinct, faded mark of a burn. A cigarette burn.
Julian stared at his daughter’s battered skin. For five seconds, the titan of industry, the man who had brought down global competitors without flinching, forgot how to breathe.
Tears—hot, burning, shameful tears of a father who had failed to see the monster under his own roof—spilled silently down Julian’s cheeks. He had left his baby with his mother. He had trusted the Vance name. He had trusted family.
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"She told me..." Lily sobbed softly, resting her wet forehead against Julian's neck, "...that if I cried, Daddy wouldn't love me anymore."
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